Heather Graham - The Unspoken

He found the hold and moved past giant crates, some protected by tarps that had withstood the years. Before him was a door, which swung open when he pushed it. The door hadn’t been sealed, which might have aided in the flooding that had brought about the ship’s demise, he thought, distracted. He didn’t care at that moment how the ship had sunk. He’d nearly reached the treasure….

As he kicked his flippers and swam through, the dive light strapped to his head suddenly went out.

He muttered to himself, tapping the light. It came back on.

He saw the boxes—huge crates, really, wrapped and sealed in waterproof tarps!—and in the midst of them, he could see the giant box with the label peeling and nearly gone, and yet…he could still read the name on it.

Amun Mopat.

There it was! The box containing the sarcophagus holding the inner sarcophagus and then the mummy. It had survived; the men who’d discovered the treasure had stolen it away carefully sealed….

Over there, boxes of jackals and sphinxes and funerary artifacts, bows, quivers—

His light went out again. Cursing silently, he tapped it. As he did, he heard a curious sound. A noise so deep in the water was different from what it would be on the surface, and yet…

It sounded like the hold door was closing on him!

The light came back on.

He stared in horror.

He opened his mouth to scream. Losing his regulator, he sucked in air, and his scream was silent.

He was stunned, terrified….

The curse! The curse, silent, unspoken in these depths…

It was real!

Yes, he had found the Jerry McGuen.

But he would not live to tell the tale.

1

“Amun Mopat,” Katya Sokolov said to Logan Raintree. “You’re kidding me, right?”

The heat that had been shining through the skylight seemed to disappear, as if the sun itself had lost some energy.

The name made her shudder. They’d just finished investigating a death in Los Angeles at Eddie Archer’s special effects studio—a death based on an old film noir remake. The original movie had been titled Sam Stone and the Curious Case of the Egyptian Museum. The new one, fittingly, was called The Unholy.

“No, I’m not kidding,” Logan said.

He had a fascinating face, the result of Native American and European parents, handsome and filled with character. She had learned to read it well, and she knew—he was not kidding.

Amun Mopat.

It was the name of the insidious ancient Egyptian priest who had supposedly come back to life to perpetrate murders. He was a character in a movie.

A character used in the very recent tragedies that had taken place.

And now…Amun Mopat?

“Amun Mopat, yes,” Logan said, almost as if she’d spoken aloud. He leaned back, looking around with a sigh. They sat in the beautiful little lobby-café of their boutique hotel, surrounded by wrought-iron lattice work and art deco design. The past weeks—although somewhat traumatic in the final resolution and cleanup—had still contained some nice upswings. They’d seen tapings of half a dozen TV shows, including Kat’s favorite comedy, spent days at the beach in Malibu, visited the Magic Castle and other attractions, and actually experienced something that resembled a vacation.

This meeting didn’t bode well. She’d received the call to meet Logan while she was enjoying a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. It had been an urgent call, and she’d known it meant she wouldn’t be seeing a retro performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show that night with Tyler Montague and Jane, two of the six in their special FBI unit.

She’d wondered if the others were going to be involved, but she was sitting here alone with Logan.

She had all but forgotten her strange dream of the night before. And now, even as it seemed to come crashing down around her, she wondered what a storm at sea could have to do with Amun Mopat.

The curse. She’d heard the words in her dream. Egyptian entities always seemed to come with curses!

“Go figure. After all this—Amun Mopat. In Chicago,” Logan said in a dry voice.

“Yeah, go figure. Chicago,” she repeated blankly.

Logan Raintree was her superior, the head of their team. Their actual boss was the elusive Adam Harrison, who had begun this excursion into the unknown—and the known—combining FBI technology and certain…unusual talents. Logan worked loosely with the head of the first team, Jackson Crow, evaluating information from those who sought help and deciding which cases truly called for their unique abilities. Since the original group of special investigators had become known as the Krewe of Hunters, they’d unofficially been dubbed the Texas Krewe. Their first case had been in San Antonio, home to many of them. Working with Logan and the other team members was thrilling and gratifying at once; it felt as if they spoke an ancient and secret language, and had come together as nationals from the same foreign country.

At the moment, she wasn’t feeling especially thrilled. Or gratified. She wished she was back at the Tar Pits.

“And you want me to go out there now?” Kat asked. She didn’t add alone.

Logan glanced at his watch.

“Yes. It could be nothing.” He shrugged. “And it could be something. But we’re talking about a dead body, and the autopsy is probably being performed as we speak.”

“Chicago is a big city, and I’m sure they have a fine staff of medical examiners and pathologists,” Kat said.

“I’m sure they do, too. But before too much time goes by, I want you in on it. Even the best people in their fields can miss little signs and clues, especially when they’re convinced by the circumstances that they’re looking at an accidental death.”

Everyone on the Krewe had his or her technical or “real world” specialty.

Hers was forensic pathology.

“Amun Mopat,” Kat said again. “In Chicago.”

Logan leaned forward. “As I said, this could be nothing—nothing at all. That’s why I need you there first. Sean is still out in Hawaii, but he’s been alerted,” he said, referring to another of their team members, Sean Cameron, who had been most heavily involved in the recent occurrences. “And we still have a few loose ends here—the last of the legal documents, another deposition—so I’m keeping Kelsey, Jane and Tyler with me. If it’s a tragic but simple case of drowning, there’ll be no need for the whole team. In that case, we’ll meet back at headquarters. But if it’s something else…”

Kat nodded dully. There was a dead body. She was a medical examiner. The dead body, of course, wasn’t an ancient Egyptian priest. It was a historian and diver.

Who had died. Searching for a sunken ship in Lake Michigan.

“I dreamed I was on a ship last night,” she told Logan.

“Really?”

“And the passengers were talking about a curse.”

His expression was serious. “Maybe you’ll be able to use that,” he said.

She smiled. “Maybe it was to warn me I was about to head off—to Chicago. And a sunken ship. And a curse.”

“I think in our line of work,” he said, eyebrows raised, “we’ve learned that curses are pretty much things people invent when they want to do something evil for their own gain. And you may only be there a few hours. Who knows? The situation might just be that this diver went overboard in his excitement when he should have waited for the other researchers. The entire discovery was supposed to be filmed. But, like I said, he didn’t wait. His excitement might have led to carelessness, which is probably what happened. And there’s always competition to salvage the treasure on a sunken trip. But because we’ve been helped by the documentary crew in question, I feel it’s important that we help out in return.”